poem’s title suggests a tone of democratic familiarity, the poem belongs
to the venerable tradition of the poet’s farewell to his book. It avoids the
impersonality of the classical envoi, however, its passionate leave taking
“being especially effective because of the association of mortality and
closing.” Indeed, the concluding verses depicting the persona’s impending
death have been called a kind of emotional “performance theater.”^49
The poem begins as the persona, like a dying prophet, utters a series
of “announcements”—verbal seeds that, long after his demise, will ®ower
into a future-perfect America. He is con¤dent that his prophetic words
will some day be rei¤ed in “what comes after me.” He prophesies an
America endowed with great institutions, populated by athletic and “natu-
ral persons,” and bound together by universal “adhesiveness”: “I announce
greater offspring, orators, days, and then depart,” he declares theatrically.
He declares, with a dash of patriotic oratory, that he had resolved early in
his career to “raise my voice jocund and strong with reference to consum-
mations.” These sociopolitical “consummations” summarize many of the
evolutionary and reformist causes that are expanded upon in such works
as “Song of the Broad-Axe” and Democratic Vistas. They embody no revo-
lutionary programs and call for no immediate social or political actions.
Rather, they trust to the passage of time and the workings of the cosmic
“law” to provide for the gradual dying out of the ®awed masses and the
emergence of “a hundred millions of superb persons.” A long series of
statements, many of them beginning with the words “I announce,” re-
capitulates the principles that supposedly have guided the persona’s mor-
tal career, among them the ideals of individualism, “immortality, the body,
procreation, hauteur, prudence,” adhesiveness, and fraternity. And for each
of these principles, he announces “at this moment I set the example” for
future generations. Just as “To Old Age” (one of the 1860 “Messenger
Leaves” poems} describes old age as the slow and steady voyage on “the
estuary that enlarges and spreads itself grandly as it pours in the great sea”
of death, so the ostensibly dying persona in “So Long!” foresees the day
when the democratic masses will be ennobled by a liberating spiritual
consciousness that enables them to accept death serenely and to make an
easy “translation” from mortality to whatever existence may follow:
So long!
I announce a life that shall be copious, vehement, spiritual, bold,
And I announce an old age that shall lightly and joyously meet
its translation.“So Long!” / 153